Fiction, Poems, Comics, Reviews & Industry News in Innovative Mag

In its tagline, Electric Lit sets out to keep literature a “vital part of popular culture.” They go about this through a focus on variety and innovation, with the content they publish ranging from flash to reviews to interviews to comics and even humorous reviews of everyday things like anxiety and fingerprints. Founded in 2009 by Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum, this journal has quickly built a platform where they can pay their contributors and offer their content for free. They publish online on a rolling basis, and their print issues are printed on demand. Thanks in large part to their sizeable editorial staff, there never seems to be a shortage of material for Electric Literature to put out into the literary world.

In the section of "Okay-Panky," Electric Lit’s mini tagline is “Literary oddments for busy people.” The first story I read, “Love Blind,” quickly made good on this claim. Here, Ambika Thompson imagines a world where a completely color-blind person and someone who can see more colors than the average person fall in lust/love thanks to a scientific experiment that puts them in a room together, their inner worlds containing more color than their outer ones, the two ruminating alternately on fantasies of navel hair and unitards. Thompson’s voice is unique--she frequently employs a controlled humor that never calls attention to itself, instead looking at the speed in which we fall in and out of love with people.

The fun thing about Electric Lit is that they’re just as comfortable publishing a round-robin-childhood-game story as they are giving a serious review of literary fiction. “Aunt Francine & the Alligator King” is a story that was improvised by a group of six writers who convened in the wonderful Malaprops bookstore in Asheville, each of the writers passing around a microphone and giving their contributions one sentence at a time. This story was as playful as any childhood story you’d create with friends, with the added benefit of the storytellers having experience with plot, character development, and twists. Whether it was the mythical Aunt Francine who hoarded animals, the chorus of cats that appeared out of nowhere, or the Alligator King himself who only wanted a jar of peanut butter, this story exemplified the way that EL likes to play with form.

Along with publishing its own eclectic collection, Electric Lit also uses its platform to spread word about literary works that might not otherwise garner much attention. In its Recommended Reading section, EL publishes fiction and alsoexcerpts pieces from larger works and then links to those works’ Amazon pages. Many mags review material from established authors and even provide interviews, but they’d also do well to emulate this method of helping out fellow writers.

While it publishes its fair share of fiction, Electric Lit predominantly functions as a way for other writers to keep up with what’s going on in the literary world. One recent article listed the six recent recipients of the MacArthur “Genius Grant,” going so far as to provide headshots, bios, and the medium/type of work that the creatives gravitate toward. One particularly interesting post highlighted a new initiative that the New York Transit Authority has taken up in partnership with Penguin Random House. Called “Subway Reads,” it’s a free digital service that allows subway riders to download stories that are tailored to the amount of time that their ride will take.

Magic realism and humor does factor into many of the things that EL publishes, but they diversify as well. Millicent A. A. Graham’s two poems, “The Game” and “The Bet” deliver stories in verses that are lyrically arresting. “The Game” centers around a game of dominoes, the language cryptic in a way that twists this everyday occurrence into something ethereal. Graham plays with the word “bones,” using it first to describe the dominoes and then in a way that recalls mortality, ceaselessly comparing the worldly to the celestial. “The Bet” handled the issue of hunger by turning it into a game, the characters nearly drowning as they guzzle water to stave off the hunger, bellies sloshing, eventually collapsing outside to sleep in the sun.

Electric Lit prefers to publish work that plays with nuance and explores the minutiae of ordinary experience, work that tells these stories in a way that turns the ordinary into the extraordinary. The story I have in mind is “Distinguished Hair” by Mike Ostrov. Ostrov eases us slowly into the world of a commercial actor, starting off by having Makeup dye the character’s hair white to make him look older than he is. The actor is past his prime, waiting for residual checks, wondering what life will be like when he grows older even as he has to feign worldliness and wisdom in his commercials. He reminisces about the adventures he and his wife once had in the same way that his characters travel and spend time with their spouses, the actor himself no longer able to do this with his own wife. He can’t seem to find the intimacy that he and his wife once shared, and yet when it comes to his commercials, this is all it takes: “We will convey a lifetime of intimacy and future full of fucking — all with the tilts of our heads.”

Electric Lit tends to publish conventional literary fiction with a tiny salt-pinch of magic realism. There’s an omnipresent humor in their pieces, but it never elbows the reader. It eases you into the story’s world so slowly and effortlessly that you become the frog in the pot--boiled alive without ever knowing that something’s wrong. Being boiled might not be especially appealing to most, but that’s the scorching equivalent of the power that these stories have. They’re quiet, but they stick with you long after they’re over.

In terms of areas of improvement, EL’s greatest asset (posting articles that keep writers informed about the industry) is also its greatest hindrance. A reader might find themselves scrolling for quite a while before finding a creative piece. But once they do find that creative piece, they’re sure to be struck by something quite powerful.